Chapter 14

From the log:

“Monday, June 28– It’s blowing up a bit this morning. I can’t get going yet, anyway, because I’ve two chores to do. I’ve got to get the spare battery for the anchor light and fix up an aerial for the radio so I can get the WWV time signal. I couldn’t hear it at all last night. If I’m left without the time signal I’ll be in a bad spot; won’t be able to tell my longitude.

“After monumental rooting around, while being tossed about in the boat, I found the battery. I also have an aerial rigged as topping lift and I got the 9 A.M. (Eastern standard time) time signal from WWV. I think I’ll just wait here another hour for the noon sight and then I’ll get going.’

Sometime during the day we completed another ten–degree step in the big countdown toward Falmouth. We moved to the east of 50° W longitude.

Again from the log:

“Wednesday, June 30– The last day of June and I’m only about one–third of the way. I don’t think the rest of the trip will take two months, but I think it will take me until Aug. 15, all right.

“I was becalmed for a couple of hours. Lay out on deck and snoozed a bit. When I looked around again the ocean seemed full of dolphins, in widely separated groups. I wonder how those far in the rear kept from getting lost.

“Later in the afternoon Tinkerbelle was visited by some very colorful fish, three or four feet long, with dark iridescent blue bodies, two forward fins of lighter blue, and bright yellow tails. They cruised back and forth under the boat as I was having supper and wouldn’t take any of the juicy morsels I offered them. [I learned later they were probably dorado.]

“Sailing in the dark, later, I was ‘pursued’ by a couple of thunderstorms. Lightning flashes lit up the entire sky, although they were too far off for me to hear the thunder.

“Finally, at about 1:30 A.M. (Tinkerbelle time), I decided to bed down, wouldn’t you know it, that’s when the first ship I’ve seen in days appeared. Fortunately it passed well to the south.”

The next day (July 1st) I got my first good shots at the sun in four days and discovered that we were about ninety miles south of where we should have been. There are places in the Atlantic where the Gulf Stream meanders, even doubles back on itself, and I think we must have run into one of these places. The current, then, began taking us south at the same time that we ran into cloudy weather, which prevented my taking sun sights that would have revealed what was happening to us. As soon as I found out, I headed Tinkerbelle northeastward and we sailed hard to regain the latitude we had lost.

On Friday, July 2nd, we went right through the center of what I took to be a cyclone, or rather, it passed by us. The wind was coming from the southeast and, as the center of the low passed over, it shifted a hundred and eighty degrees very quickly, in no more than five or six minutes, to the northwest. And it rained very hard, both before and after the shift.

“Saw what I can only describe as a giant sea worm,” I wrote later in the log. “It was about the same color as an ordinary garden worm, but about 10 feet long and fatter in proportion to its length than an ordinary worm.”

We got back up to the latitude we should have been at on Sunday, July 4th, and the next day I awoke at about 5 A.M., Tinkerbelle time, had a good breakfast and got under way.

The sun was peeking through clouds and it looked as though the day could go either way: cloudy and dreary or sunny and cheery. It went sunny, at least for most of the day. And I went cheery. The breeze was perfect, ten to thirteen knots, just the right force. And it was out of the south, which made it easy for me to steer our course of 67°. We made good time. The fine weather, the blue beauty of the sea and the easy, smooth rolling of the swells put me into a wonderfully happy frame of mind.

“The only thing that could make this day more perfect,” I said to myself, “would be for a ship to come along and pick up my mail.”

About twenty minutes later I took my eyes off the compass and looked around the horizon and there, over my right shoulder, steaming toward me like the answer to a prayer, was a ship. It turned out to be the 12,640–ton cargo vessel. S.S. Steel Vendor, bound from India and Ceylon to New York.

Its master, Captain Kenneth N. Greenlaw, maneuvered the big ship very well, making it easy for me to bring Tinkerbelle in close, to within fifty feet of its starboard beam. The day was so calm, and the 492-foot Steel Vendor and the 13 ½ -foot Tinkerbelle were so close to each other that Captain Greenlaw and I had no difficulty making ourselves understood. He wanted to know if I was lost and I assured him I wasn’t, but that I’d appreciate a check on my navigation. So he gave me our position: 40° 53′ N and 47° 2′ W.

“Do you need any provisions?” he asked.

I assured him I had all the provisions I needed, and yet he looked skeptical, as though he just couldn’t believe it. He seemed to be a big man, and he had a friendly face and a warm manner about him.

He readily agreed to take my mail aboard and soon a crewman heaved a line to Tinkerbelle. I had a bundle of ten letters all ready in a waterproof plastic bag and attached it quickly to the end of the line. Then the crewman hauled away. The letters were aboard the ship in a jiffy, on their way to my family and friends ashore.

“Thanks!” I yelled, waving to the captain and all the crew. “Have a nice trip.”

“You have a nice trip!” the captain shouted back.

We all waved again, slowly drew apart and then turned stern to stern and resumed our separate courses. In a few minutes I was alone again on the restless sea.

Three days later, at one in the afternoon, we were becalmed at the center of a flat disc of blue. I used the time to bathe, dry blankets and clothing, write in the log and play the harmonica. Tinkerbelle had a small forest of gooseneck barnacles clinging to her bottom by then, for she had been at sea more than five weeks, so I also reached down as far as I could all around her and pulled off as many as possible. I think my efforts enabled her to sail a little more jauntily for several days afterward.

It remained calm until long after dark, the lengthiest period of calm we had yet encountered; but when I awoke in the morning a nice breeze was agitating the surface of the ocean. We started moving eastward again. Although it was rainy and dismal, we had good sailing all that day and the next.

“Looks as if it’s going to be another dull, cloudy day, and the wind seems a bit strong for comfort,” I wrote in the log shortly after awaking Sunday, July 11th.

This was an important day to me because sometime during the next ten hours (if the sailing was good) I expect to pass the meridian of 40° W, the next step in the longitudinal countdown to England. Passing this meridian would put me very close to the halfway point in the voyage, which, for my purposes, I decided was the meridian of 37° W. Since the winds were mostly westerlies, 40° W also was what I considered to be the point of no return; that is, the point from which it would be as easy, or easier, to sail on to England as to return to the United States, although, in case of trouble, the Azores still offered the closest haven. So I was hoping to have a good, long day of swift sailing.

“During the night the wind shifted from west to northwest,” I continued in the log. “The shift has made it considerably cooler, but now we’ll be able to reach rather than run. I just hope the wind doesn’t get so strong we have to quit and put out the sea anchor.

“Well, now, up and at it.”

The wind was strong and the waves seemed huge (some of them, I thought, were twenty–footers, the biggest yet), but I kept Tinkerbelle boiling along under genny only.

Conditions continued like this, teetering on the verge of being too obstreperous to handle, until just after twelve o’clock. Then, dramatically, the sky cleared and we were presented with a lovely sunny afternoon.

My spirits were beginning to soar when, crrraaack! The rudder snapped, rendering Tinkerbelle unsteerable.

It took me a few minutes to collect my wits and formulate a plan of action to deal with this crisis, but eventually I got organized and started to repair the original rudder, the one that had broken first, as it seemed to be the more reparable of the two. While I was pulling myself together, a breaking wave crest caught Tinkerbelle beam on and knocked her down, plopping me into the ocean for the fifth time. The boat righted herself at once, good girl that she was, and I scrambled back onto her very quickly, for by that time I had amassed considerable boarding experience (I knew exactly what to do to get back on her with the least effort and loss of time) and I immediately threw out the drogue so that the knockdown wouldn’t be repeated.

It was desolating to have such a fine day and not be able to sail, but the cruel fact had to be faced–and dealt with. I gathered together my tools and, with pieces of oak, brass bolts, fiberglass and waterproof glue, went to work on the rudder in the relative comfort of the cabin.

Late in the afternoon I took a sun shot. It indicated we were only three or four miles away from 40° W longitude, but the news cheered me scarcely at all. I wasn’t in despair, for I knew I could fix the rudder. I was as confident as ever that we’d reach England safely. But the enforced halt for repairs and the slowness of our progress made me melancholy. I missed Virginia and Robin and Douglas, and I didn’t want to be delayed and cause them unnecessary concern.

“Tinkerbelle and I will make it all right,” I wrote in the log, “but I hate to be so far behind schedule because I think V. and the kids may worry.”

By nightfall I had stewed myself into a state of severe depression. For a few frantic moments I even considered swinging southeastward, once the rudder was serviceable again, and making for the Flores, in the Azores. But after dinner that evening, as I was writing of the day’s events, I spotted the tip of a piece of paper sticking out from between the pages of the spiral–bound notebook that served as my log. I pulled it out. It was a leaf from a little booklet that only Virginia could have put there. It said, in part:

“Charles A. Lindbergh, flying the Atlantic alone, came to the point where he could go no farther. He was exhausted. His hands were so tired they refused to obey his mind. Then he said he made this simple prayer: ‘God give me strength.’ From that moment on he declares that he sensed a third part of himself. It was ‘an element of spirit,’ which took control of both mind and body, ‘guarding them as a wise father guards his children’.”

Finding this message at that moment of utter dejection was a bit of a miracle, for I desperately needed something or someone to snap me out of it. Despite my having been reared by missionaries, I have never been able to get on intimate terms with God (not that I wouldn’t like to), so I cannot attribute its appearance on the scene to divine intervention. Nevertheless, it satisfied a keenly felt psychological hunger. The content of the message was helpful, of itself, but what did most to lift my sagging spirits, I think, was the realization of the loving devotion that led Virginia to slip the message into my log. That gave me strength and elevated my mood. Before long I was back on even keel.

The ocean was calm the next day (July 12th), so calm we couldn’t have moved even if the rudder hadn’t been broken. That was O.K. with me, for it meant we weren’t missing out on a favorable breeze.

I finished the repairs and all that remained was to wait overnight for the waterproof glue to harden. We’d be able to sail in the morning. I felt like my old self, and that evening I took a sextant shot at the sun that made me feel even better. It showed that while I’d been working on the rudder the Gulf Stream had carried us eastward past the meridian of 40° W longitude. We had completed another giant stride toward our journey’s end and had passed the point of no return.